Abstract
Passenger car torque converters have been designed with an increasingly flatter profile in recent years for the purpose of achieving a weight saving and more compact size. However, a flatter design tends to result in the reduced hydrodynamic performance. To improve its performance, a new flat torus of elliptic type method concentrating on the solution to flat TC was put forward, and four torque converters of different flatness ratios were designed to judge the superiority of the flat torus design method. The internal flow characteristics were numerically investigated using CFD codes and resulted in good agreement with experimental data. The results indicate that the main cause of this performance degradation can be attributed to deterioration of the velocity fields of the pump, and a case of flatness ratio 0.8 illustrates the reason that the performance designed by the flat torus design method based on the elliptic shape is more excellent than that of the traditional one. Furthermore, this study proposed a structure of removal of inner ring to improve the performance of torque converter.
Highlights
Internal combustion engine vehicles that employ automatic transmissions typically include a torque converter (TC) positioned between the engine and the transmission of the vehicle
The results indicate that the main cause of this performance degradation can be attributed to deterioration of the velocity fields of the pump, and a case of flatness ratio 0.8 illustrates the reason that the performance designed by the flat torus design method based on the elliptic shape is more excellent than that of the traditional one
Four torque converters of different flatness ratios are designed to judge the superiority of new method; Rothalpy is used to quantitatively evaluate the hydraulic loss and predict the region where large loss occurred with a flatter design
Summary
Internal combustion engine vehicles that employ automatic transmissions typically include a torque converter (TC) positioned between the engine and the transmission of the vehicle. Most passenger cars with small and medium displacement engines have adopted a front-wheel-drive layout in recent years, and the gears of gearbox and output torque of passenger cars equipped with AT are continuously increasing These components, together with locking clutch and torsional vibration damper, need more space [1, 2]. A new design method of elliptic type has addressed the above shortcomings; the performance characteristics of TC of flatness ratio 0.8 were numerically investigated through the CFD approaches. It has demonstrated the superiority of new method and illustrated the internal flow mechanism of performance improvement.
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